Medical Anthropology Flashcards
Medical Anthropology
An area of anthropological inquiry that focuses in issues of well-being, health, illness, and disease as they are situated in their wider cultural contexts
Well-being
A state of general physical and mental comfort and good health: a lack of illness
Health
A cross-cultural term to describe a person’s general social, psychological, and physical condition
Illness
A culturally identifies state of general physical and/or mental discomfort
Disease
A bio-medical condition characterized by a harmful biological irregularity in an organism
Etiology
The study of the causes of a disease and/or an illness
Two types of interpretive systems
- Personalistic - illness caused by supernatural forces
2. Naturalistic - the causes of illness are rooted in the physical world
Ethnomedicine
The study of traditional healing practices of particular ethnic groups ex. Local knowledge of the body What it is meant to be well Structural suffering Separation of mind and body
Epidemiology
The study of the occurrence, spread, management, and prevention of infectious disease
Cultural Epidemiology
Study the cultural-cultural distribution of disease and the variable determining these distributions
Four approaches within Medical Anthropology
- Ecological/ Epidemiological Approach
- Interpretive Approach
- Critical Medical Approach
- Clinical Medical Approach
Ecological Approach
Examines how aspects of the natural environment interact with culture to cause health problems and to influence their spread throughout the population
Ex. Hookworm in China
Patterns related to the fact that the disease is spread through the night that is applied as a fertilizer to the fields were they work
Interpretive Approach
Considers how people in different cultures label, describe, and experience illness and how healing offers meaningful responses to individual and communal distress
Ex. Childbirth among the Kuna
A specific healing song sung during childbirth helps women through labour
Critical Medical Anthropology
Illness is more often a product of someones defined position that natural
Shows how economic and political systems create health inequalities
Exposes the power of medicalization
Ex. Link Between poverty and illness
Clinical Medical Approach
The application of anthropological knowledge to further the goals of health-care providers
Ex. Diabetes in a Ojibwa community
Ethnographic work into Ojibwa concepts of disease responsible creating a successful treatment program in Toronto
